Description

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In March 1953, seventeen years before he received the Nobel Prize, Alexander Solzhenitsyn ended his term in the Ekibastuz labor camp with the play Victory Celebrations and seven of the twelve scenes of Prisoners committed to memory. During his ensuing internal exile, he completed Prisoners and started another play, The Love-Girl and the Innocent. The result is a dramatic trilogy focusing on events of the year 1945: the Russian army’s advance into East Prussia and the “repatriation” of former Russian prisoners of war to the Gulag labor camps.

The three plays transmute Solzhenitsyn’s own bitter experience of war and imprisonment.

In Victory Celebrations (translated by Helen Rapp and Nancy Thomas), one can recognize the author in Sergei Nerzhin, a captain in a Soviet artillery battalion whose staff improvises a banquet in a captured castle in East Prussia. Celebration turns to conflict when Nerzhin sides with Galina—a Russian emigree whose husband is fighting with the Germans—against Lieutenant Gridnev, an officer in military counter-intelligence who insists Galina is a spy.

Prisoners (translated by Helen Rapp and Nancy Thomas, and based in part on Solzhenitsyn’s own initial arrest and captivity) follows a group of political prisoners, including ex-POWs, from their arrival in a Soviet prison on the Prussian border through their perfunctory interrogation, trial, and conviction.

Solzhenitsyn’s alter-ego in The Love-Girl and the Innocent (translated by Nicholas Bethell and David Burg) is Rodion Nemov, a new prisoner in a labor camp whi is unwilling to compromise in order to survive. This final play in the trilogy is, as Martin Esslin wrote of the 1981 Royal Shakespeare Company production, “a classic portrayal of the Gulag.”

These plays from the 1950s are among the Nobel laureate’s earlier writings. But in his indignation at injustice and moral bankruptcy, Solzhenitsyn the playwright prefigures Solzhenitsyn the great novelist.

About the Author

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in 1918. In February 1945, while he was captain of a reconnaissance battery of the Soviet Army, he was arrested and sentenced to an eight-year term in a labor camp and permanent internal exile, which was cut short by Khrushchev's reforms, allowing him to return from Kazakhstan to Central Russia in 1956. Although permitted to publish One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962—which remained his only full-length work to have appeared in his homeland until 1990—Solzhenitsyn was by 1969 expelled from the Writers' Union. The publication in the West of his other novels and, in particular, of The Gulag Archipelago, brought retaliation from the authorities. In 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, stripped of his Soviet citizenship, and forcibly flown to Frankfurt. Solzhenitsyn and his wife and children moved to the United States in 1976. In September 1991, the Soviet government dismissed treason charges against him; Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994. He died in Moscow in 2008.